It gets worse for them every year: Students fall behind in grade school, and by the time they're in the eighth grade, many have at best a fifth-grade education. Getting them ready to pass the LEAP test means teaching not only eighth-grade lessons, ...

05/20/02

By Brian Thevenot Staff writer/The Times-Picayune

Holding up a tiny slip of green paper, eighth-grade math teacher Elzy Lindsey had a sliver of knowledge to impart: "This, ladies and gentlemen, is an inch."

His fourth-period class broke into giggles. Duh!

"Hey, you know why I think this is a good activity? Last year, I asked an eighth-grade student at the end of the year, ‘How big is an inch?' He holds his hands up like this" -- Lindsey's arms were a foot and a half apart, like a football referee -- "Touchdown!"

More laughter.

"Y'all laugh. I almost cried. How are you going to pass LEAP if you don't know what an inch is?"

Lindsey moved through the room handing out green inches. Students lined them up against Q-tips, straws and packets of sweetener, then recorded the measurements on a chart.

For a few students, work this elementary was wasted time. But Lindsey knew that last year's class had done miserably on LEAP questions involving weights and measures.

No devotee of the cult of self-esteem, he was blunt with his students about their math deficiencies. "Some of these things are first- and second-grade concepts, but the idea here is that we're not leaving anybody behind," he told his class. Lindsey knew that his students, many the products of unstable homes and years of third-rate schooling, could hardly be blamed for their lack of knowledge -- they're just kids, for God's sake.But in Room 204, Lindsey was trying to turn them into adults, to get them to take ownership of their academic fate.

David Pichon knew what an inch was; measurement was one of his few strengths in math. But he liked Lindsey's style: The lesson was fun, if not challenging, and David knew there were plenty of things he should have learned in elementary school but didn't. He was glad to see Lindsey knew it, too, and wanted to help.

To David, Lindsey seemed a notch above his elementary school teachers. Many of them just passed out worksheets, just work-work-work and keep quiet. David didn't think that was really teaching. It was just lazy and mean.

For the first time in a long time, he was excited to come to math class.

David's class was a microcosm of the school and of many public schools in New Orleans. Most students were three to four grade levels behind in math, and many were slow readers -- an issue Lindsey also needed to address, given the many word problems on the LEAP test.

Were these students academically doomed? Some surely were. But Lindsey had decided to reject that outcome. It was a leap of faith, but without it, why teach at all? His students would just have to work harder than those at more stable, privileged schools. Lindsey knew the opposite had been true in the past.

His students had had "a Swiss-cheese education," learning some skills in isolation but never connecting the computational tidbits to any deeper understanding of mathematical logic. After all, the system itself was full of holes: chronic turnover of teachers and curriculum, crumbling buildings, administrative turmoil and an anemic tax base.

By the time they came to eighth grade -- where three out of four Wright students failed the math LEAP test last year, only slightly worse than the district as a whole -- many didn't know their multiplication tables. Most struggled with long division. They had a vague notion of fractions, decimals and percentages, but little skill in manipulating them.

The LEAP test would require answers to multistep word problems and a basic grasp of algebra and geometry. But first, Lindsey had to make sure they could identify an inch, and a pound, an ounce, a gallon, a quart. He had to demystify the enigmatic vocabulary of math -- "sum," "difference," "product," "exactly alike," "opposite," "related" -- so his students could understand what the word problems asked them to do.

Teaching them the basics by rote memorization had failed in the past, so Lindsey, with the help of a new curriculum for all learning academies, was trying to show them math.

"You realize this is how measurement started?" he asked, stopping to grab a student's forearm and press it against his own. "They figured out that the forearm of a grown person is about the same length for everybody, then they standardized it and made rulers."

That got a few wow-I-never-thought-of-it-that-way looks, and a boy asked, "So do we start measuring, at zero or 1?"

"Good question!" Lindsey fired back. That's how it was supposed to work: The student deduced for himself what he knew and didn't know. "You start measuring at zero -- not one -- because there's one inch between zero and one."

No more grief

During English class, David had answered a set of questions under the heading "Who am I?"

Now, he stood to read his responses, among them, "I'm an easy-going boy, but if you press my button, I will have to hurt you."

It was a message to the other students, some of whom had mocked him mercilessly in past school years: I want to be your friend, but I won't take any grief.

David's academic prospects had started to dim long before he came to Wright, and his difficulties had little to do with math. The teasing had started in the fourth grade at Henry W. Allen Elementary School, shattering his concentration, shifting his focus from classwork to the big knot in his stomach.

It started when some boys saw him dancing with a group of girls. They branded him a sissy, and he made the fatal mistake of letting them see that their razzing rattled him, so they piled it on.

As the taunts escalated in fifth, sixth and seventh grades, his grades tumbled. His mother told him he didn't deserve to pass the sixth grade at Allen, but the school let him slide by anyway. Bracing for more of the same this school year, David prepared a few comebacks before school started, rehearsing some classic yo-momma-isms in front of a mirror: "Your momma is the hunchback-lookin'est thing I ever seen."

One even had a prop: a picture of Maxine, a raggedy stray dog that David had taken in. He kept the photo in his pocket the first few days of school and whipped out for the punch-line: "That's why you look like my dog -- beaucoup mange."

David was by no means friendless. Nor was he alone in taking abuse after school and in the schoolyard, where relentless ribbing is as common as playing tag. It takes a quick tongue and a thick skin to get along in a world where everyone at some point takes a turn as an outcast. Someone is always too fat, too skinny, too tall, too short, too dark, too light, too smart, too dumb.

David was still learning the game. The jeers still ate at his insides. Sometimes, he was simply embarrassed or annoyed; at other times, he was infuriated, indulging in private revenge scenarios. He put it all under the generic description "bad nerves."

He was no fighter. But a few times during his tumultuous seventh-grade year, he felt cornered. His young blood still boiled at the memory of two boys handing him a videotape last year.

"This is you," one of them said, before running off laughing.

David took it home. It was gay pornography. He had to do something. He went to school the next day with the tape, broken in two, and threw it at the boys.

"Don't you EVER f- - -ing mess with me again!"

David traded a few punches with them before the principal broke it up. He was proud of defending himself, but the satisfaction was fleeting. And nothing much changed around the yard.

This year, David was taking a different tack, learning to bury his emotions, to smile and walk away or return fire with good-natured comebacks.

As summer crept into fall, he started to catch a few breaks. The first was that a reinvigorated commitment to discipline at Wright -- backed by a new district policy that slapped a $25 fine on the parents of students who fight -- had made the social climate more civil. The second was that his circle of friends was steadily widening.

Among them was Cornell, a socially skilled eighth-grader from the neighborhood. David had known Cornell for years, but lately they'd been hanging out more, both in and out of school.

They played football with other boys and went swimming and hung out in the storage room under David's house, where he had set up a clubhouse with a bed and a TV. Cornell introduced David to a lot of new people at Wright, vouching for him.

By October, David's nerves were less frayed. Classmates often called him a nickname David liked just fine, his initials -- "D.P." -- and for once, it seemed like everybody wanted to be his friend.

School's best hope

In the classroom, students such as David surely were a challenge to their teachers. But they also were the school's best chance to boost its all-important performance score, the reason Wright had made the state's list of failing schools in the first place. The mandate for the low-scoring learning academies was to show improvement, and David was an improvable student: On a report that grouped eighth-graders into four performance categories, David was one of 40 students listed on the "maximum impact" sheet. "Students listed in this report are the greatest hope for boosting your test scores with the least amount of intervention," the heading said.

That assessment was based on David's seventh-grade standardized test score of 23 out of 100, low compared to student scores nationally, but more than double the scores of about 80 Wright eighth-graders listed on the "special needs alert" list. Just 15 of 150 students were on the "class strength" list, denoting scores near or above the national average of 50. The "gifted alert" list was blank.

Though many Wright students started the year way behind, Principal Sharon Clark had to smile when the results of the first standardized quarterly test came back, just before Thanksgiving. On average, Wright students had correctly answered 49 percent of the questions on the English test, more than any other learning academy, and 47 percent on the math test, third among the 11 schools.

The principal was proud of her students, but she decided not to let them know it. She couldn't afford to have anybody getting cocky so early in the game. Instead, Clark called an assembly to read them the riot act.

Rather than tell them their scores, she told a white lie.

"If I gave the LEAP test today, only about two of you would pass!" she told them, hoping fear of failure would motivate them.

David was taken aback. How the heck did she know? Sure, many of the students were way behind, but to say almost all would fail offended him. Still, he knew that in his case, there was a glimmer of truth in what she'd said. He knew he probably hadn't passed the survey test -- he'd left a lot of questions blank -- and he was worried about what that meant for the real LEAP test.

Hands-on lessons

Though anxious about the LEAP test, David was enjoying math class. Lindsey brought math to David's level with plain language and lessons he could see, touch and feel. One early class favorite had them measuring their tennis shoes, then cutting out matching lengths of construction paper to create a bar graph. Using the graph, they covered the concepts of "mean" and "median."

Despite his students' enthusiasm for such projects, Lindsey was troubled when he graded his first classroom test during his afternoon planning period. The class average was a 66, and that was inflated because many students who scored 28 percent, or 40 percent, or 47 percent, had their grades raised to 60 in keeping with district policy. Even some of his stronger students scored poorly on what he knew would be his easiest test.

Even though Lindsey had grown accustomed to about half of his students failing any given classroom test, the scores baffled him. The new curriculum, the LEAP-inspired and locally produced "Deep in Math," was supposed to be simpler, better suited to his students' specific weaknesses. In a tacit acknowledgment of the extent of the math crisis, eighth-graders at Wright and all learning academies started with the same text as sixth- and seventh-graders.

Lindsey knew it was a little early for them to be so far behind. He had thought this material was elementary.

David scored a 62 -- which counted as an F, but by no means the lowest F. He did well on questions asking him to estimate the length in inches of items pictured on the test, and on a graph-reading exercise, but fractions stumped him. When asked to identify, in words and as a symbol, the fraction represented by a shape divided into eight equal parts with three of them shaded, he wrote "7/3 seven three" instead of "3/8, three-eighths."

David, along with most of his classmates, also missed two questions asking them to draw hands on a clock face representing "25 minutes to 5" -- he drew what looked like 11:20 -- and "a quarter past twelve," having interpreted "quarter" to mean 25 minutes, like 25 cents, an error made by many students.

Lindsey kept hammering away at the concepts that many of his students had missed: more on fractions, more on measurement, even a lesson on weights that used a balance scale to teach about pounds and ounces and the concept of relative density. At the end of the class, Lindsey piled items totaling equivalent weights -- pound bags of rice and peas, classroom supplies -- on two sides of the scale, balancing it. "And that, my friends, is an equation," he told them.

On the second test, David got a 76 -- he got the fractions and clock-face questions right this time. The rest of the class grades followed suit, including a handful of A's and B's.

It gave Lindsey some much-needed hope.

Staff writer Brian Thevenot can be reached at bthevenot@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3482. Staff photographer Ted Jackson can be reached at tjackson@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3420.